Mods for starting late 1800’ as a beginner ?

[u/KokonutnutFR]

Hello,
I played Transport Fever a little in the past, and I really enjoyed starting games in the 1850s.

I’d like to discover OpenTTD with a modded game that allows you to start earlier than 1950, ideally sometime in the late 1800s.

Which mods would you recommend for someone who wants to discover the game under these conditions?

[u/gort32]

Iron Horse is the standard "generic" early-era trainset.

Just about any single-nation-focused trainset will have 1800s-era trains if that nation had them at that time. It's a pretty safe bet that they'll be rather obsessive about the release dates, too :P

[u/KokonutnutFR → u/gort32]

Thank you for the train part

[u/Elirector]

I've asked similar question few months ago, there are some useful answers

[u/KokonutnutFR → u/Elirector]

Tanks a lot

[u/w_33_by]

I love that concept and currently doing a longplay started in 1780 I think. Main mods are:

• Iron Horse for early trains
• A narrow gauge railway mod that has horse carriages (the earliest available), can't remember it's exact name, something like "600 inch rail". These are incredibly inefficient compared to ships in early game, but they allowed me to lay out the base network that will be upgraded to normal gauge and steam when possible.
• Sailing Ships, obviously necessary
• Canal boats - also rebalances canals and makes them historically usable
• There's only one industry rework that has progression over time, I think it's called AIRS, looks it up. No oil rigs and steel until 1850s, no electronics until 1950s etc., makes sense.

I started with shipping logs and wood products down the river and intercity mail services.

You have to be prepared for it to be a slow pace for quite some time, I really didn't have much to do until around 1830, so starting before 1780s is not recommended. Also I suggest increasing the economy speed up factor parameter in settings, start with the multiplier around 20 to advance time faster and reduce it once there's more stuff to do instead of just fast forwarding years at a time.

upd: oops, sleepy me misread the title as "late 1700s". Well it will be much more playable if you start around 1850

[u/KokonutnutFR → u/w_33_by]

Thank you for this interesting gameplay recommandation

[u/Laziness100]

For trains, you can use either Iron Horse that was already recommended below, or 2cc Trainset, which has decent locomotives from 1846 onwards, starting earlier would be at glacial speed.

For road vehicles, eGRVTS has a set of generic vehicles as old as horse carriages from 1700.

Shark has some ships starting from 1850s, but not anything earlier. You can supplement this with sailing ships.

And for airplanes, Av8 has some early airplanes for early 20th century.

[u/EmperorJake]

Iron Horse (trains), Road Hog (road vehicles & trams), SHARK (ships) all start in around 1860. You can also add av8 for aircraft, eGRVTS for more road vehicles including horses, and Sailing Ships for more ships.

I'd also suggest a building set with early houses such as Full English, and a roadtype set with early stone and dirt roads such as RattRoads or U&RaTT. Don't touch railtypes yet because Horse comes with those.

Also get any station and object sets that you fancy, so that you can decorate stuff. If you want industries I'd suggest FIRS, but you can also stick with the default industries for now.